Sterling is broad. He's most famous for techno body horror, but his historical fantasies and economic stories are distinct and equally good. In fact ISterling is broad. He's most famous for techno body horror, but his historical fantasies and economic stories are distinct and equally good. In fact I think his Exotic (But Non-Japanese) Cyberpunk is probably his key style. Here’s his Balkan SF, roadside kiosk as vanguard of the future:
These strangers and foreigners expressed odd, truncated, malformed ideas of what he had been doing. Because they were the Voice of History.
He himself had no such voice to give to history. He came from a small place under unique circumstances. People who hadn’t lived there would never understand it. Those who had lived there were too close to understand it. There was just no understanding for it. There were just…the events. Events, transitions, new things. Things like the black kiosks…
To the neighborhood, to the people, he was a crippled, short-tempered old landlord. To her, the scholar-bureaucrat, he was a mysterious figure of international significance. Her version of events was hopelessly distorted and self-serving. But it was a version of events.
This stuff is harder than it looks. Witness the many laughably dated K00L stories of the 90s. (Gibson.) This is dated, but it's not the tech or the slang that does it. It's the excitement about the internet as ontological shift, about cultural hybridisation, postmodern whoah; also the urgent grappling with Islamic philosophy and politics. (I shouldn't say 'dated'; matured.)
Sterling prefigures half of recent SF. We have a grand, mindless, terrifyingly efficient foil (a la Watts), a profiteering parasite civ (Pohl, Vinge), a genetically labile bodysnatcher (Tchaikovsky, Corey), early modern magic realism (Chiang, Borges), colonialism and cosmopolitanism as the original first contact (Stephenson), Western ideology as alien (Chiang), a paean to the technician and the technologist (Stephenson, Gibson), antihuman technologies (Gibson, Stross, Watts), even boringly transcendent evaporation as natural endpoint of conscious life (Banks). Sterling feels like a skeleton key for the last twenty years.
The Shaper stories are nasty - one notch short of body horror, three notches past psychological horror, economic horror: I love it. Looking for one line to catch his essence I plumped for
Tons of predigested fungal pap went into the slick blind jaws at one end.
Then
“This urge to expand, to explore, to develop, is just what will make you extinct. You naively suppose that you can continue to feed your curiosity indefinitely. It is an old story, pursued by countless races before you. Within a thousand years—perhaps a little longer—your species will vanish.” “You intend to destroy us, then? I warn you it will not be an easy task—” “Again you miss the point… Do you suppose that fragile little form of yours—your primitive legs, your ludicrous arms and hands, your tiny, scarcely wrinkled brain—can contain all that power? Certainly not! Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise. The original human form is becoming obsolete. Your own genes have been altered, and you, Captain-Doctor, are a crude experiment. In a hundred years you will be a relic. In a thousand years you will not even be a memory. Your race will go the same way as a thousand others.” …
Stone-faced children wandered aimlessly through suburban halls, dazed on mood suppressants. Precious few dared to care any longer. Sweating Marketeers collapsed across their keyboards, sinuses bleeding from inhalants. Women stepped naked out of commandeered airlocks and died in sparkling gushes of frozen air. Cicadas struggled to weep through altered eyes, or floated in darkened bistros, numbed with disaster and drugs.
Ranked: 1. ‘Green days in Brunei’ 2. 'Twenty evocations' 3. 'Dori Bangs' (only if you love Lester Bangs like I do) 4. 'In paradise' 5. 'The little magic shop' 6. 'Hollywood Kremlin' 7. 'The Blemmye's Strategem' 8. 'Are you for 86?' 9. 'Spider Rose' 10. 'The littlest jackal' 11. 'Dinner in Audoghast' 12. 'Cicada queen' 13. 'Maneki Neko' 14. 'Kiosk' 15. 'Deep Eddy' 16. 'Swarm'' 17. 'Bicycle repairman' 18. 'Taklamakan' 19. 'We see things differently ' 20. 'Our neural Chernobyl' 21. 'Sunken gardens'' 22. 'The compassionate, the digital' 23. 'The sword of Damocles'
All worthwhile up to "We See Things Differently".
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'Brunei' is glorious. It contains four or five intellectual feints. It's about the communitarian appeal, and the individualist appeal.
“Here at least people really care and watch over each other…” She gritted her teeth. “Watching. Yes, always.”
It's a presumptive decoding of Malay culture. (“The Bruneians, like Malays everywhere, adored ghost stories.”) It's a great love story, a modern romance, a particular male romance. One character, initially depicted as decrepit and ridiculous, turns out to be a revolutionary colossus. Turner makes a grand conversion to human-centred technology, Gross National Happiness kind of stuff - and then this conversion is immediately subverted. The plot is driven by conveniences and I don't care at all.
The women worked on, wrapped in the lamp’s mild glow. Innocently, they enjoyed themselves, secure in their usefulness. Yet Turner knew machines could have done the sewing faster and easier. Already, through fishing smacks, as he watched, some corner of his mind pulled the task to computerized pieces, thinking: simplify, analyze, reduce.
But to what end?… People in the West talked about the “technical elite”—and Turner knew it was a damned lie. Technology roared on, running full-throttle on the world’s last dregs of oil, but no one was at the wheel, not really… “The “technical elite” were errand boys. They didn’t decide how to study, what to work on, where they could be most useful, or to what end. Money decided that. Technicians were owned by the abstract ones and zeros in bankers’ microchips, paid out by silk-suit hustlers who’d never touched a wrench. Knowledge wasn’t power, not really, not for engineers. There were too many abstractions in the way.
(Why is eight million regarded as a fortune of global renown though? Eight million what? CAD??)
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‘Magic Shop’ is great fun. Initially it looks like a great gag: a fantasy protagonist with no interest in mysteries, treasures, princesses, vengeance, or Journeys.
Later:
O’Beronne gave him a poisonous glare. “You’re a hundred and forty years old. Hasn’t the burden of unnatural life become insupportable?” James looked at him, puzzled. “Are you kidding?”
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A couple of these stories make me queasy. This is hard to do!
Part of this is Sterling's habit of having horrible narrators. One is an Islamist assassin, and his ideology is so galling because it is not only false (e.g. Western perfidy in Iran). I realised only halfway through that the old label for Sterling was "postmodern". It says something that that label has become so marginal and forgettable in the last 10 years.
The Starlitz stories are particularly strong. Starlitz is like Stross' Manfred Macx - an agent of the future - but in a curious amoral way. He runs guns for the Russian mafia and for psychotic Finnish nationalists. He lusts over trends and capital and flashy collectibles. He embodies the future but not progress: change in a nonmoral sense.
The undergrad revolutionary Aino is very tragic. Her mind is totally consumed by post-Marxist revolutionary fervour - but Marxism without hope, the nationalist perversion of the International. I recognise her, her inhumane mind-killed purity. it breaks my heart.
I I envy her historical experience so much. There’s something so direct and healthy and physical about hijacking planes.
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'Maneki Neko' is an exquisite portrait of networks, the gift economy, and another sweet vision of a kind of digital culture we haven't gotten yet. Replace money with a terrible god who can solve the problem of double coincidence. Also the brutality and inexorability of 'Elua'. (The cat thing is also an egregore, of course. How better to overthrow a government than to charm literally everyone and destroy its tax base?)
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Excellent pastiche of cranks (Prigogine is an antishibboleth):
I sniffed at the phenethylamine, the body’s own “natural” amphetamine. I felt suddenly dizzy, as if the space inside my head were full of the red-hot Ur-space of the primordial de Sitter cosmos, ready at any moment to make the Prigoginic leap into the “normal” space-time continuum, the Second Prigoginic Level of Complexity…
“We’re past the Marxist thing,” said Khoklov, warming to his theme as the pill took hold. “Now it’s different. This time Russia has a kind of craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the whole world. Massive, total, institutional corruption: Top to bottom: Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that will sell anything: the flesh of our women, the future of our children. Everything inside our museums and our churches. Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We’ll sell the soil and the forests and the Russian sky. We’ll sell our souls.”
“Any system of rational analysis must live within the strong blind body of mass humanity, Mr. Dertouzas. If we learned anything from the twentieth century, we learned that much, at least”
Random, in the very specific early C21st sense of the word - gorillas in unexpected places, men in dresses, vicious gang leaders with secret feminine Random, in the very specific early C21st sense of the word - gorillas in unexpected places, men in dresses, vicious gang leaders with secret feminine sides, and so on. Chapters are 6 pages, setup and gag, setup and gag, hundreds of times. And he’s not very good at drawing movements. And most of the characters are pretty similar - credulous, chatty, pedantic, loveable thugs. (Maeda is sensible and so put-upon by the cracked logic of the comedy world.)
But it’s actually funny, actually earning its fourth wall violation and dumb nonsequiturs. Half of the comedy might be in how deadpan everyone is. I don’t know anything about the genre it’s parodying and I still loved it....more
Lovely gender role mess: men as vicious, gossiping, jostling concubines in a matriarchal Japan. Not gentle, except by comparison to other samurai storLovely gender role mess: men as vicious, gossiping, jostling concubines in a matriarchal Japan. Not gentle, except by comparison to other samurai stories.
The cod Shakespeare translation, all the “on’t” and “thy”, is a little grating, but it has enough charm to make up for it....more
Just glorious, a cracked mirror. I can’t think of any other cartoonist who can make me laugh without words, who assumes the mantle of slapstick. But oJust glorious, a cracked mirror. I can’t think of any other cartoonist who can make me laugh without words, who assumes the mantle of slapstick. But on top of that she cuts very deep into the weirdness of things, the tears of things.
The book is also large: 25 stories where 10 would have been marketable, people would’ve bought that.
After years I finally understand why she’s so funny: she depicts herself, all of us, as animals. Bug-eyed, chaotic, mechanical, inexplicable, barely in control of this great noble and ignoble body.
It may be the best depiction of humans as confused, out-of-distribution animals in all of pop culture....more
Deeply uncanny - without worshipping mystery. ("Tlön" is scarier to me than anything in Lovecraft. "Babel" is also horrifying in its way.) Playing at Deeply uncanny - without worshipping mystery. ("Tlön" is scarier to me than anything in Lovecraft. "Babel" is also horrifying in its way.) Playing at the limits of reason - without renouncing objectivity. (There is something of the unearthly drama and transcendence of higher mathematics in a couple of these stories.) Somehow it manages to be cryptic without being annoying, to use literary gossip and the droning of archivists straight. Some of this is 80 years old, and it's still completely fresh.
He makes literature larger, by bringing new things into scope - bibliographic minutiae, English department arcana, salon gossip. There's something refreshing about his perfect fake book reviews. Gushing praise of nonexistent authors draws back the veil (as if our world's reviewers would say the same things whether or not the authors existed).
Borges was not a postmodernist but these anyway have the best of what postmodernism is taken to mean: nonliteral play, generative scepticism about sense and reference and language-games, reasoning about the limits of reason.
I'm not sure of the significance of some of Borges' sentences here. But for once the critic's working assumption of meaning seems sound: if I thought about it, I could find out. (And not just in the ordinary way, by projection. I expect to find Borges in them if I try.)
I've some ideas about each story, but none that fit completely or exhaust them. Here's one:
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Here's a banal idea: "language is composite". Characters go into words into sentences into works into worldviews. In "The Library of Babel", Borges stretches this fact until you see the horror in it, the shocking vastness of exponentiation on the tiny scale of a human life. The simple idea of mechanically generating all strings of length n=1,312,000 leads to an incredibly claustrophobic closed system. The story is not 8 pages long but contains more than most books.
There exists one truth; there are uncountably many falsehoods; but worse, there's a far larger infinity of nonsense, of things which make sense in no language, which don't make enough sense to be false, which never will. This is the horror of Platonism or Many-world physics or Meinong: that we could be invisibly boxed-in by garbled infinities, endless keyboard mashing. The "noosphere" - all the good ideas, all the bad ideas ever had - is a tiny pocket of meaning in a sea of meaninglessness.
The stunning effect of "Babel" depends on its not being magic, not hand-wavy (merely monstrous, physically impossible for interesting reasons which violate no particular law). Ted Chiang is grasping at a similar titanic scale when he uses a truly alien language to explain variational physics.
Remember that Borges was a librarian. But, while he said photogenic things about libraries, he didn't necessarily like being in them. "The Library of Babel" adds an extremely mordant overtone to that quotation, by imagining an otherworldly library which breaks men just by being there. Sturrock, his biographer:
Borges had some reason to dislike libraries because for nine years "of solid unhappiness", from 1937 to 1946, he was obliged to work in one, as a quite junior librarian, in order to make money. The cataloguing work he did was futile...
The alphabet used for the Babel books has 22 letters and no uppercase. We could try and look up human languages with that many letters, but better to take this as a hint that our narrator is not us - he can be a total alien, far from Earth, and the exact same library will still confound him the exact same way. The same geometry constrains all minds. What looks like meaning need not be, if your sample is large enough:
This useless and wordy epistle itself already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves in one of the uncountable heaxgons - and so does its refutation. (And n possible languages make use of the same vocabulary; in some of them the symbol 'library' admits of the correct definition 'ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries', but 'library' is 'bread' or 'pyramid' of anything else... You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?)
The narrator says that the fall from his floor "is infinite" (or indefinite), that the rooms are "uncountable", but we can do better than this quite easily, given only the text. There are 410*40*80 = 1312000 characters per book. The number of distinct books is thus (22 + 3)^{1312000} or about 2 followed by about 1.8 million zeroes. It is hard to give a reference for how large this is: if every atom in the universe contained as many atoms as are in the universe (10^80), and each of the nested atoms was a Babel book, this would still contain only a laughably tiny fraction of Babel, less than one googolplexth. There's 4*5*32 = 640 books per hexagon, so we need about 3 x 10^1834094 room-sized hexagons. This is the full implication of the simple thought "every book of length 1312000".
It couldn't possibly be even fractionally built. And yet, through the power of maths, it has been built - "only implicitly, skeletally", but it still counts.
(Borges notes this infinity/finity conflict on the last page, explaining that the Library is unbounded and periodic, a hypersphere.)
There is a beautiful, inspiring lesson to be taken from it actually: think about what the incredible feat of writing any book - no matter how bad - actually entails. Our nervous system shields us from Babel, from the larger part of possible meanings and the overwhelming majority of string space. This is an astonishing act, in information-theory terms: the ultimate search, which we succeed at effortlessly, many times a day. Epic achievements in life-giving ignoring....more
Superlatively brainy and silly fairytales, with wizards replaced by AI engineers. Think Carroll, Smullyan, Juster, Egan, heavier than heaven.
QuantitatSuperlatively brainy and silly fairytales, with wizards replaced by AI engineers. Think Carroll, Smullyan, Juster, Egan, heavier than heaven.
Quantitative slapstick:
And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values
Despite appearances, it's not light fiction. It covers the impossibility of making people happy, the absurd birth and death of a robot without senses, the arbitrariness of power. The shadow of the Soviets falls on the stories quite hard.
Trurl notarizes, issues directives, the typewriter chatters, and little by little an entire office takes shape, rubber stamps and rubber bands, paper clips and paper wads, portfolios and pigeonholes, foolscap and scrip, teaspoons, signs that say “No Admittance,” inkwells, forms on file, writing all the while, the typewriter chattering, and everywhere you look you see coffee stains, wastepaper, and bits of gum eraser. The Steelypips are worried, they don’t understand a thing, meanwhile Trurl uses special delivery registered C.O.D., certified with return receipt, or, best of all, remittance due and payable in full- he sends out no end of dunning letters, bills of lading, notices, injunctions, and there are already special accounts set up, no entries at the moment but he says that’s only temporary. After a while, you can see that that is not quite so hideous, especially in profile - it’s actually gotten smaller!-yes, yes, it is smaller! The Steelypips ask Trurl, what now? “No idle talk permitted on the premises,” is his answer. And he staples, stamps, inspects vouchers, revokes licenses, dots an I, loosens his tie, asks who’s next, I’m sorry, the office I closed, come back in an hour, the coffee is cold, the cream sour, cobwebs from ceiling to floor, an old pair of nylons in the secretary’s drawer, install four new file cabinets over here, and there’s an attempt to bribe an official, a pile of problems and a problem with piles, a writ of execution, incarceration for miscegenation, and appeals with seven seals. And the typewriter chatters: “Whereas, pursuant to the Tenant’s failure to, quit and surrender the demised premises in compliance with the warrant served habee facias posessionem, by Div. of Rep. Cyb. Gt. KRS thereof, the Court of Third Instance, in vacuo and ex nihilo, herewith orders the immediate vacuation and vacation thereunder. The Tenant may not appeal this ruling. Trurl dispatches the messenger and pockets the receipts. After which, he gets up and methodically hurls the desks, chairs, rubber stamps, seals, pigeonholes, etc., out into deep space. Only the vending machine remains. “What on earth are you doing??” cry the Steelypips in dismay, having grown accustomed to it all. “How can you?” “Tut-tut, my dears,” he replies. “Better you take a look instead!” And indeed, they look and gasp-why, there’s nothing there, it’s gone, as if it had never been! And where did it go, vanished into thin air? It beat a cowardly retreat, and grew so small, so very small, you’d need a magnifying glass to see it. They root around, but all they can find is one little spot, slightly damp, something must have dipped there, but what or why they cannot say, and that’s all. “Just as I thought,” Trurl tells them. “Basically, my dears, the whole thing was quite simple: the moment it accepted the first dispatch and signed for it, it was done for. I employed a special machine, the machine with a big B, for, as it is the Cosmos in the Cosmos, no one’s licked it yet!” “All right, but why throw out the documents and pour out the coffee?” they ask. “So that it wouldn’t devour you in turn!”
how do you [humans] build your progeny?" asked the [robot] princess.
"In faith, we do not build them at all," said Ferrix, "but program them statistically, according to Markov's formula for stochastic probability, emotional-evolutional albeit distributional, and we do this involuntarily and coincidentally, while thinking of a variety of things that have nothing whatever to do with programming, whether statistical, alinear or algorithmical, and the programming itself takes place autonomously, automatically and wholly autoerotically, for it is precisely thus and not otherwise that we are constructed, that each and every paleface strives to program his progeny, for it is delightful, but programs without programming, doing all within his power to keep that programming from bearing fruit."
Kandel's translation (from the Polish) is maybe the greatest I've ever seen: hundreds of puns, neologisms, fake academese, and absurd alliterative names, all rendered into English without slips or missed opportunities. I read this over a month, savouring.
Again excellent - a better Dune, a much better Narnia, a peer to Ulysses. Throws you off balance right from page one - there's about 50 pages of plot Again excellent - a better Dune, a much better Narnia, a peer to Ulysses. Throws you off balance right from page one - there's about 50 pages of plot missing between the first and second volumes, never really recounted. Since the Book is a chronicle written much later by Severian, this is maybe to show how old the book is when the in-universe reader finds it.
One of the great things about Severian is that he's various - he has many conflicting goals, none of which is really the master quest. He swears I think four absolute oaths to different authorities. Jonas teases him about this:
"You want to serve Vodalus, and to go to Thrax and begin a new life in exile, and to wipe out the stain you say you have made on the honor of your guild — though I confess I don’t understand how such a thing can be stained — and to find the woman called Dorcas, and to make peace with the woman called Agia while returning something we both know of to the women called Pelerines... I trust you realize that it is possible that one or two of them may get in the way of four or five of the others.”
"What you're saying is very true," I admitted. "I'm striving to do all those things, and although you won't credit it, I am giving all my strength and as much of my attention as can be of any benefit to all of them. Yet I have to admit things aren't going as well as they might. My divided ambitions have landed me in no better place than the shade of this tree, where I am a homeless wanderer. While you, with your single-minded pursuit of one all-powerful objective . . . look where you are."
As the retrospective journal of a victor (and as a work of nasty, feudal science fiction) it has the same feel as Dune, only less clumsy: we know that Severian or Paul have prevailed or will, but this somehow doesn't unstring the plot.
There is a lot of plot, a lot of one-off scenes and people. It's all earned though, through symbolism or callback or prose. Hundreds of pungent sentences ("praise the Autarch, whose urine is wine to his subjects...").
I was trying to get a handle on all of pop music - pop, that is, in the broad sense that anything that couldn't get played in a fancy concert hall is I was trying to get a handle on all of pop music - pop, that is, in the broad sense that anything that couldn't get played in a fancy concert hall is pop, that anything newer than Gershwin is pop. I spent years on this endeavour, eventually reaching the Scaruffian fringes: everything at least heard of, every landmark clung to by fingertips. I'm not sure why I did it.
Or, I know but it isn't pretty: The people who know most about music are the ones who need it most: need it as a pretext to wear headphones and not talk to people, need it as vicarious catharsis for things felt but never said, need it as a gigantic arena for countercultural status, where if you only put in a thousand hours of skronk and dischord, then you're a thousand hours ahead of someone.
Reading Lester Bangs on the Comedian Harmonists (!), included here, remains one of the most powerful moments in my entire reading life. The unsurpassing joy of discovery, of crossing cultures, of fandom....more
Haven't read this since I was 16 but it left such a dent in my head and my prose.Haven't read this since I was 16 but it left such a dent in my head and my prose....more
A beautiful portrait of pragmatism vs idealism, colonialism and collaboration, surveillance culture vs everything, the possibility of deep translationA beautiful portrait of pragmatism vs idealism, colonialism and collaboration, surveillance culture vs everything, the possibility of deep translation, the beauty and gaucheness of trade, and the ultimate fate of civilisations.
Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle… There were programs here written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it — the horror of it… down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems…
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret…“You and a thousand friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it… And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies...”
Vinge's great skill is in drawing out sick tragic tension for hundreds of pages, driving the reader on to ever more complex injustices, until... The smooth-talking fascist antagonists are a bit too simple, a bit Harkonnen; their mind-raping slavery, their inversion of justice by lying perfectly, their flat-toned planning of atrocities:
"At which time, we'll feed them the story of our noble effort to limit the genocide." Ritser smiled, intrigued by the challenge. "I like it."
You are made to wait 500 pages for a comeuppance. The "Focused", the mindwiped slaves are extremely creepy; weaponised savants (see Ada Palmer's set-sets for a less straightforward treatment of human computers).
Pham Nuwen, the great programmer-statesman, is far more interesting here than in the first book. He stands out in a large cast of interesting characters, all laying down schemes and intrigues with at minimum 20 years until payoff (at maximum 2000 years). Not ordinary, but not unrealistic; there have been dozens like him, possessed of or by the force that drives Napoleon off his island, Washington over the river, Alexander everywhere. He is a psychopath:
The [armed fascists] might try to chase him around in here. That would be fun; Nau's goons would find just how dangerous their tunnels had become...
The evolutionary role of such people - both the fearless hero, Nuwen, and the bloodthirsty predator, Nau - is not handled explicitly, but Pham is held up as a paragon.
The arachnid aliens are much better than the hivehounds of the last book: Vinge and his translator characters' anthropomorphisations (or, rather, personalisations) are successful. Though maybe I'm just biased because the Spiders are shown going through their Information Revolution rather than their Pre-Renaissance period. It shows the deep connection between lack of economic growth, lack of intellectual growth and lack of social progress. The great scientist Sherkaner is also the one to challenge his society's sexual oppression. ("Either way, the cycles were shattered forever") The "counterlurk" is the Enlightenment. It's an exquisite portrait of the great promise and risk of a technological society; you get the end of hunger and disease, you get spaceflight, but you also get nuclear standoffs.
There are wonderful symmetries between the Spiders and humans: they each have odd, distended sleep cycles (the humans going into cryogenic suspension most of the time, the Spiders hibernating centuries until the sun reignites). There's also the Sura/Pham, Qiwi / Ezr, and Victory/Sherkaner pairings, the actual beauty of complementing another, of power couples with aims beyond their own power.
The title looks clumsy but isn't: it refers to a very large thought, that decentralising a system is the only way to make it last; that space is not only a cold and hostile place, it is also the way to break the terrible forces that might work against mere interplanetary civilisations:
Pham would get their localizers in return for decent medical science. Both sides would benefit enormously. Magnate Larson would live a few extra centuries. If he was lucky, the current cycle of his civilization would outlive him. But a thousand years from now, when Larson was dust, when his civilization had fallen as the planetbound inevitably did—a thousand years from now, Pham and the Qeng Ho would still be flying between the stars. And they would still have the Larson localizers...
"If you accept the trade I'm hoping for, you will live just as many years as I. But I am Qeng Ho. I sleep decades between the stars. You Customer civilizations are ephemera to us."
One unintentional detail: the "huds" that all the human characters depend are I think just Google Glass.
Stayed up late to finish it. Maybe 5/5, will re-read in a while and see.
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How does it do as Serious science fiction?
Social development: all three societies depicted are very distinct and have believable economies, genderings, . The Qeng Ho - the empire without a capital, the force without an army - are a lovely depiction of the humanistic and progressive side of trade. The Emergents are maybe a little too simple, too feudal and dastardly.
Software development: Fantastic. Central to the plot (titanic cruft as feature), with a subtle twist on the horror of legacy systems: an entire multi-planet civilisation is shown collapsing because its software is too fucking crufty to live. (That might sound ridiculous, but I promise you I see this story in miniature everywhere at my work.) No one does it better.
Actual Science: Lots, with a breathless romp through all of C20th physics and engineering - though there's also a magic antigrav ore.
The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But
The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet...
Tumbling from the back of my tongue down to my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate. Technology with a human face.
Exhausting - but funny! - postmodern critique of postmodernism. Maybe David Foster Wallace did it better but this is still a thrill...more
: All of my reviews, all of my essays were written in the glow and shadow of other things I should've been doing.
All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they find the time. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because accomplishing these tasks is a way of not doing something more important.
If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him to do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important...
Doing those tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, you can become a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being...
The second step in the art of structured procrastination is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal projects have two characteristics -- they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't), and they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. At universities, the vast majority of tasks fall into those two categories, and I'm sure the same is true for most other institutions...
At this point, the observant reader may feel that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly... what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the effects of another?
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Work and study pressurise my life. They give me a structure to defy, a gravity assist. I am happiest laden with obligations, when the set of tasks that is my life flies just out of control. I think the mechanism is this:
1. I require a steady stream of variety. 2. Having a job makes my days closely resemble each other. 3. Intolerable resentment. I am forced to produce creative sparks to satisfy my basic drive.
SP is related to how great I feel when I don't have to go to a party, to my sadly efficient approach to grades, to how giving work to a busy person is a good way of getting it done quicker, i.e. an implausible linear increase of output with increasing things to do. I read more fiction when doing a stats degree and learn more stats when in work.
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Antecedents of Perry and me.
Fernando Pessoa:
I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth... to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on. I know that, had that past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, I would undoubtedly have only day-dreamed, given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul. Much of what I feel and think I owe to my work as a book-keeper since the former exists as a negation of and flight from the latter.
Nietzsche:
the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity... produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely-strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals... we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? The goal to aim at...
Geoff Dyer:
The best circumstance for writing, I realized... were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances, the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and the sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that.
Zach Weiner:
[After months of working only on my main goal] I took on a job doing closed captioning because I found it [made for] an easier time writing. Just something about talking to people and watching weird media made the writing a lot easier. My new theory of self was that you can't write well unless you have a little strife in your life. I worked at the closed captioning job for 4-6 months and by then I was making enough money on the site to responsibly quit my job.
The problem was I didn't want to quit my job and have readership fall off because I couldn't write, so my crazy idea was to go back to school. I thought, it'd to be this weird environment, with younger people, and that would be good...
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Is this platitudinous? It is possible that the grand narration above is delusional, and that the only actual content here is "A lot of people work better under pressure". Don't think so though.
Crushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and 'Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as aCrushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and 'Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as an ex-desperate-teen, ex-psychiatric-nurse, metal fan, America's greatest lyricist of neurosis). Heavy.
It doesn't matter if you've never heard or never liked Sabbath. This explains it regardless, and might unlock it. His best prose (though his lyrics 1995-2004 are his best words).
to say that love is what motivates most of us who are neither complete bastards nor distracted by secondary concerns sucby the Unknown Anti-ethicist.
to say that love is what motivates most of us who are neither complete bastards nor distracted by secondary concerns such as “what other people will think” – to say this is not to say anything very neat or tidy. But that too is as it should be.
One of the Frankensteins, those endlessly interpretable load-bearing columns dotted around literature. Of negation, dignity, irrationality, silence, iOne of the Frankensteins, those endlessly interpretable load-bearing columns dotted around literature. Of negation, dignity, irrationality, silence, impermeability.
What is Bartleby, if not just depressed or hyper-lazy? Well there’s the defensive Stoic catatonia, or wu wei; Bartleby as crypto-proto-Marxist; Bartleby as waning Übermensch, squatter monk, annoying Christ; Bartleby as dissociating schizophrene or autist; Bartleby as Death of Dead Letters; Bartleby as PTSD ghost; Bartleby as all our inarticulate idiosyncracy, as utter Other – “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!”
Some people (e.g. Blanchot, Hardt & Negri, Setiya) view him as heroic, but he’s more hallucinogenic and morbid: he lacks everything but refusal; he throws his life away. And that’s a living death, a non-human void (“I never feel so private as when I know [Bartleby is] here”).
So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it.
That copyists are an extinct breed only adds to the seething flavour; it is possible that OCR and distributed Captchas could have minimised Bartleby’s suffering - that the condition the piece wrangles with isn’t eternal. What would Bartleby be today? Not, I think, an Occupier; rather a impassive backstreets bookshop owner, or a kombucha stallholder or whatnot.
I prefer to read Melville’s voice - waffling Victorian persiflage - as an assumed decoration for the windbag lawyer’s voice (however much Moby Dick shouts otherwise)....more